Here's an interesting article about cookie design, especially that of the noble Oreo. I don't eat that kind of thing anymore but I find the history and artistry rather fascinating. I was especially amused by their comparison of the Oreo design to that of the lowly Hydrox cookie, and I was unaware that they apparently don't make Hydrox cookies anymore.
Vaguely relevant anecdote: Twenty some-odd years ago, there was a great little place over on Santa Monica Boulevard near Sepulveda that sold ice cream they made on the premises. Most of the flavors were their own creations and about half — and they had them nicely segregated and labelled — contained liqueurs or other spirits. I avoided that side and usually had something they called Cashew Crunch, which contained bits of cashew and smashed Oreo cookies in a vanilla ice cream with a fudge swirl. In fact, a lot of their flavors involved crushed Oreos at a time when that wasn't too common in the ice cream business.
My friends and I loved this store to the point where when we went out for dinner, we'd sometimes go to a somewhat mediocre restaurant in the same block just so we could go to the great ice cream place for dessert. One evening, I took my friend Tracy there for ice cream…and you need to know this about Tracy: Don't ever lie to her because she'll nail you on it. She usually knows and if she isn't sure, she'll interrogate you within an inch of your life. Five minutes with Tracy and O.J. would have confessed to the double-killing and probably other crimes we don't know about.
So she wants some flavor involving crushed Oreos but she demands of the guy behind the counter, "How do I know these have Oreo crumbs and not Hydrox crumbs?" He says she can take her word for it. She says that's not good enough and he makes the guy go into the back of the store and bring out this huge crate of Oreos. This proved at the very least that the business received huge crates of Oreos. From that, she grudgingly made the leap to the assumption that they actually did use Oreos, not Hydroxes, in their ice cream. (That was one of the drawbacks of the Hydrox. It was tough to speak of them in the plural…and who would ever eat only one?)
Know, by the way, that Tracy didn't necessarily prefer Oreo to Hydrox. She just felt that if it said Oreos — and it did — then it had damned better be Oreos.
A week or so later, I'm in there with someone else and the guy behind the counter recognizes me. He says, "You're the one with the friend who demanded proof that we don't use Hydrox." I 'fessed up that I was. He lowered his voice so no one else in the store could hear and said, "The owner gets a deal on Hydrox and we sometimes use them and tell people they're Oreos. We just happened to be out of Hydrox the week your friend was in and so we went out and got a crate of Oreos and were using them." He pointed to the ice creams currently in the display that said "Crushed Oreos" in their ingredients lists. "All of these have Hydrox crumbs in them," he said.
Two weeks later, the store was out of business. I think we all know why.